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An Anniversary of ‘Heartbreaking Grief’ in Japan

People visited a memorial at an elementary school near Ishinomaki, Japan, where 74 children died in the tsunami that occurred a year ago on Sunday.Credit
Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

NIHONMATSU, Japan — Nobody knows whether Hiroshi Yokoyama’s elderly parents tried to outrun the tsunami that engulfed their home in Namie on the Fukushima coast a year ago.

But Mr. Yokoyama does know that he would have looked for them high and low, if not for a second disaster that unfolded at the nuclear power plant just a few miles away, forcing him to abandon his search.

As grieving families across the nation gathered Sunday to mark the anniversary of Japan’s 3/11 disasters — an earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the northeastern coast, killed almost 20,000 people and caused a huge nuclear radiation leak — some communities are still coming to terms with the calamity’s scale, complexity and lasting effects, and painful new revelations have shed light on how some of the victims died.

Last week, the police in the Futaba-gun region of Fukushima, which includes the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station and the town of Namie, confirmed that a handful of tsunami survivors who were trapped in the rubble probably starved to death as rescuers fled the scene for fear of radiation. A month passed before rescuers were able to venture back into the exclusion zone set up in a 12-mile radius around the nuclear plant; the bodies of Mr. Yokoyama’s parents were not discovered until the summer.

“If only there was no nuclear power station, lives could have been saved,” Mr. Yokoyama said. He thinks, and hopes, that his parents were quickly overpowered by the waves and avoided the drawn-out deaths that some around them may have suffered.

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Teruko Sato, 73, prayed at the site where her son's body was found in Kesencho, Japan, following last year's earthquake and tsunami. Shoichi Sato, 47, died while helping evacuate elderly residents of the village.Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

A year later, Mr. Yokoyama and his wife and two young children are still unable to return to their home on the shore. They observed the anniversary in Nihonmatsu, a city about 35 miles away, where a group of Namie townspeople now live.

“If only there was no nuclear power station, we could all go home,” Mr. Yokoyama said.

Across the country, there were hundreds of memorial services on Sunday like the one in Nihonmatsu. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, in a nationally televised address, pledged to work for a faster recovery. “We shall not let our memory of the disasters fade, and must pay attention to disaster prevention and continue our effort to make this land an even safer place to live,” he said.

Japan’s reconstruction has accomplished much in the past year. Virtually all of the tsunami zone’s roads have been fixed, and many landscapes once strewn with debris are now lined with tidy plots and a growing number of restored buildings. Severed manufacturing supply chains have been re-established, and some of the region’s devastated fishing ports are back in service.

But the still-evolving story of the towns like Namie is a painful reminder that the three-pronged onslaught of earth, sea and radiation that hammered the country a year ago was no ordinary disaster. The waves that crashed into Namie not long after the magnitude 9.0 offshore earthquake at 2:46 p.m. that day swept entire houses out to sea, witnesses said.

By nightfall, rescuers reached some of the worst damage in the town’s Ukedo district. In the pitch blackness — the town’s power supply had been knocked out — they heard taps and voices, possibly survivors under the mangled debris.

But as darkness enveloped them, the rescuers decided to suspend their search until dawn. “We told them we would be back,” said Kimihisa Takano, a neighborhood volunteer firefighter. “But we never did.”

Mr. Takano instead found himself helping evacuate the town after reports of a radiation leak from the nearby Daiichi nuclear plant. The town owned only a handful of microbuses and other vehicles to get residents out, and as news spread of the unfolding nuclear crisis, commercial bus companies refused to travel to Namie, slowing the evacuation.

With no guidance from Tokyo Electric Power Company, the nuclear plant’s owner, or the central government, town officials led evacuees north, believing winds were blowing the radiation south. They would later learn that the wind had swung north and that they had fled right into the path of the radiation plume, despite the existence of government simulations that could have pointed them to safety instead.

All the while, residents pushed for rescuers to return to Namie to resume their search for missing loved ones. “They were telling us, ‘What are the police for?’ ” said Takashi Sato, a police officer for the Futaba-gun region and a native of Namie, who fielded some of those calls. “But there was no way we could have carried out full-blown searches with radiation so high and the plant so volatile.”

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When Mr. Sato and his colleagues finally entered the exclusion zone for a search mission in April, there were no survivors. Four bodies were discovered at a still-intact hospital in Okuma, next to Namie; an elderly man was found dead on the undamaged second floor of his house, Mr. Sato said.

They are all presumed to have died of causes other than the tsunami, probably starvation, Mr. Sato said.

There are signs that victims in other towns and cities around the Daiichi plant, 160 miles north of Tokyo, suffered a similar fate. Ryuzaburo Shineha, a doctor in Minamisoma who helped examine bodies pulled from the tsunami wreckage there, deemed that 5 out of 34 bodies he handled had died from debilitation.

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The Daiichi plant leak forced searches to be abandoned.Credit
The New York Times

“Their bodies were unnaturally thin, suggesting that they likely had nothing to eat or drink for a long time,” Dr. Shineha said. “We concluded that they survived for some time after the tsunami, but became debilitated. Radiation doesn’t kill you straight away, but these people were really dying. The authorities should have gone in to rescue them.”

In all, 1,605 people have been confirmed dead in Fukushima, and 214 remain missing and are presumed dead. In Namie, almost 200 died and 3 remain missing.

Even as the area’s evacuees awaited news of their relatives, towns and cities there splintered. The 20,000 former residents of Namie are now scattered across 620 towns and cities in Japan, according to town officials. Five other jurisdictions around the Fukusima Daiichi plant remain evacuated.

The government has acknowledged that some areas near the plant may be uninhabitable for decades.

More recently, some residents have been allowed on several visits to their tsunami-ravaged homes. When Kazuhiro Shiba, 48, returned to his home in Namie in June, he found a ship blocking his front door. Mr. Shiba has no illusions about moving back. “We’re just lucky to be alive,” he said.

At the Namie memorial service in Nihonmatsu, bereaved families lined up to lay white chrysanthemums at an elaborate altar. Two Buddhist priests offered funeral rites.

“Our search for survivors was delayed by a full month,” said Eiko Yoshida, a Namie native and a member of Fukushima’s prefectural assembly, offering a shaky apology on behalf of the government to those gathered. “When I think of the suffering endured by the victims and their families, I am overcome by a heartbreaking grief.

“We experienced three disasters all at once. Never has this happened in the world.”

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo.

A version of this article appears in print on March 12, 2012, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: An Anniversary of ‘Heartbreaking Grief’ in Japan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe